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Thinking Inside the Box

07 Jun Thinking Inside the Box

I’ve been working on some major improvements to the Time Entry screen in FlexiTime. Being able to expand a time entry graphically by dragging a handle on either side of the box will be a nice improvement that will speed up entering time.

Other improvements I’m working on are making the whole time scheduler resizable. Currently the proportions of time entries and the scheduler are set based on the size of the application when the flash file is first loaded. If you change the size of the browser window the scheduler stays the same virtual size meaning vertical and horizontal scrollbars are shown. By resizing the scheduler window the whole scheduler is still displayed without scrollbars when the browser window is resized.

What this allows us to do is create a side panel to appear beside the scheduler to hold all those buttons that aren’t used so much but take up screen real estate, such as the zoom button and the radio button for selecting work view or employee view.

We’re also going to use this side panel to display a speed entry view of time entries, so when you click on a time entry you won’t need to double click on it to see the details, they’ll be displayed and modifiable in the speed panel.

We’ve also improved the time entry component itself. Currently you need to hit tab (or enter?) to change between start and end time or between hours and minutes. The new component is going to let you enter time a lot faster by letting you enter 24 hour time, hours and minutes in a single entry box, and FlexiTime will work out what time you meant.

Other things we’re working on are remembering what your last time entry was and defaulting the values on a new time entry and letting you click on the time schedule or drag to create a new time entry at that time.

All these changes should be available in the next couple of weeks all going well.